I've recently been exploring KXStudio through Ubuntu repos, and it's been a rather pleasant experience overall. My kudos to the team behind it (@FalkTX, I'm not aware of the other contributors).
It took me some time to figure out that I actually don't need Cadence to be running at all, and I can manage my saved sessions entirely through Claudia! I kept seeing Cadence as a Qjackctl equivalent, in other words the 'central control' of the entire setup. Which brings me to a minor inconvenience: I have to remember to start the ALSA-MIDI bridge every time I restart the studio. And there's no option to do this from the Claudia system tray - one has to open the window, menu dive to turn it on.
Granted, this is a minor quibble, but when creativity strikes and you want to make music, every mouse click is an annoyance...!
So my question is: Is there a way to keep ALSA-MIDI bridge always on, like QJackctl does? Any step in this direction, or suggestions of workarounds, would be appreciated!
The overlapping roles of Claudia and Cadence give rise to another minor workflow nitpick. So I start my studio using Claudia as my central control. But when I want to start the Pulseaudio bridge, I need to open Cadence and menu dive. It would be nice if this option were in Claudia's system tray.
Which brings me to the bigger question: Why treat the two as separate applications, when so much funcionality is overlapping? The ideal workflow, IMHO, is one application to rule them all, a single centralized control, with minimal menu-diving. Note that Cadence doesn't serve this purpose either - I can start a studio from Cadence, but when stopped from there, Claudia crashes inelegantly! So I find that right now, I have to open both Cadence and Claudia and menu-dive to get my setup working. Alternative suggestion: Allow Claudia studios to be elegently closed when Jack is stopped from Cadence, so Claudia need not be opened at all.
The above should not be construed as criticism, though. The fact that these are minor nitpicks is testimony to the solid vision behind KXStudio. But I hope these suggestions can help improve the workflow, so as to make them more inspiring for musicians to work with.
- Guru